MAXIMISE CUSTOMER CONTACT TO MAXIMISE CUSTOMER LOYALTY
How would you like:
– 79% of new business generated through referrals
– 93% customer retention rate
– Consistent and sustainable double digits growth?
This is what Gael Limited achieves. Gael is a software and services company based in East Kilbride, Scotland which has over 2500 customers in over 90 countries. This article is based on the presentation that Donald Maciver, the founder of Gael(www.gaelquality.com), gave at our conference in June. Having worked with Gael we have included one or two observations of our own.
Here are the key points from Donald’s talk:
They have extremely strong knowledge, understanding and know-how in their chosen industry markets.
Their areas of excellence are in Quality, Incident Management, Safety and Risk. This coupled with their industry expertise allows them to sell a long term business strategy rather than a one-off software licence.
Like all good software companies, they have a help desk to manage customer issues. However, unlike many other software companies their help desk is proactive and works with their customers to ensure that project objectives are met and that their customers are getting real value from their investments.
Customer Service engineers follow through actions arising from the proactive helpdesk to address shortcomings, create awareness, nurture ideas, encourage take-up and as an outcome deliver qualified leads.
Gael has a customer portal where all the obvious tasks are managed, such as submitting support requests, monitoring progress of these, frequently asked questions etc. However, for their customers, there is much higher value to be gained through the ability to connect and collaborate with over 2500 quality professionals worldwide, to share best practice, and to give input on Gael’s development roadmaps.
The company has created a comprehensive on-line training capability allowing its customers to develop the skills and knowledge they need to get the best out of their systems. Its 24 x 7 availability serves its global customer base in a very customer cost effective manner.
They also run user and focus groups so that they can continually keep abreast of customer needs and satisfaction, industry trends and discuss future developments.
It goes without saying that each customer has a sales person responsible for them, and, of course, they have an information rich website where potential buyers can check out the many customer case studies that are there to support their referrals strategy.
This package is an investment in customer loyalty through the provision of face-to-face, over the phone and through the internet maximisation of customer touch points.
As Donald says “you have to give BIG to get bigger. It’s a long term strategy and short termism will always harm customer service and loyalty”